It's Christmas

Glen's done a few good posts on the Reason for the season:

Incarnation & Trinity

Incarnation & Creation

Incarnation & Salvation


And hopefully if Leon doesn't mind - I'll take a quote from his essay on Irenaeus's view of the incarnation:

“Original creation was not ‘perfect’ for Irenaeus. It is good, and even very good, but not perfect, though it can be perfected. For Irenaeus, salvation (and the incarnation) is not a consequence of the Fall of creation, but that creation is a consequence of “God’s project of salvation.” For Irenaeus, a created thing is intrinsically changeable, corruptible and subject to decay. Focusing on man, from the start he was “childish and immature and not yet fully trained for an adult way of life… so God could have offered perfection to man at the beginning, but man, being yet an infant, could not have taken it”, hence the Fall. In Irenaeus theology, the Fall seemed to have been unavoidable, because man is created and is not in himself filled by the Spirit to be enabled to fight decay and corruption. Man matures only as the Image (Spirit-filled Son) takes on the flesh of Adam so as to take Adam’s flesh into the Image, and thus fill Adam’s flesh with the Likeness of God(Spirit). In Irenaeus own words, “Now this is His Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, who in the last times was made a man among men, that He might join the end to the beginning, that is, man to God.” This, for Irenaeus, is “recapitulation”. It is not a return to Eden, for man to once again be immature and fall, but to perfection along with all creation where what is “mortal should be conquered and swallowed up by immortality, and corruptible by incorruptibility.””